The Next Journalism will be a service that helps build community

Tom Rosenstiel reporting: This column, launching today, will be about where news media culture is heading. We are calling it The Next Journalism.
The subject matter will range widely. The search for new revenue to subsidize the mission of journalism will be part of the focus. So will experiments in how to use new technologies and platforms to gather and report news. The ethics and values that make news useful and reliable will be another topic. And a central goal will always be to understand the changing nature of how the public consumes and shares news. The column will not shy away from debate, though argument will not be the prime purpose.
It will be a reported column, one grounded in facts and offering new information. But it will be a column with a point of view.
With that in mind, readers are owed a few disclosures about the assumptions and predilections that will inform that opinions found here.
I believe that in some quarters too much of the conversation about the future of news leans toward the theological rather than the empirical. That may be understandable during a moment of change because it helps move people to think in new ways. Yet as the digital revolution matures, it can also become less helpful. It is important — and will become more important — to understand the world as it is, not only as we theorize it or wish it to be. In this space I will strive to approach topics with a cold eye and an open mind.
The ideas in this space will be grounded in history — not nostalgia. I’ve been a press critic, reporting on media, since the mid-1980s. The digital transformation is profound. It is also not unprecedented. One of those precedents is that many of the predictions about the future prove mistaken.
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/the-next-journalism/202676/the-next-journalism-will-be-a-service-that-helps-build-community/